4.7 Measuring Success

Evaluating the success of your web development strategies will help you make adjustments to your web site design and marketing tactics to be more efficient with your time and money in getting the guests you want.

Ideally you will be able to determine cost per visitor, cost per new potential guest (contact info including email), cost per web marketing campaign, return on investment.

Outside of the strategies discussed here, it is in your interests to track acquisition, retention, value, profitability and satisfaction of working with different guests.

The success factors addressed here will relate to steps you can take to get useful information that you can put to immediate use in continually adapting your crm/web enhancement strategies.

This tutorial addresses four useful data sets:

• tracking your off-web media/advertising,
• general and deep web site use,
• email & newsletters,
• keyword advertising.

Determining the effectiveness of your crm/web enhancement strategies requires a commitment within your organization to collect data and analyze it.

Tracking traditional Media, Public Relations and Advertising & Web Marketing

The things you already do to promote your business away from the web can be easily and inexpensively tracked. Assuming your tactics have an option of calls to action, you may receive these inquiries by: email, telephone, or web site visits.

Prepare to Collect Incoming Data:

email: use a specific email address for each marketing campaign. Inquiries to this address can be easily tallied and yield the origin of the inquiry without asking the origin of the inquiry (ie. create virtual addresses for each show you do: ). Consider making show or advertising offers which are connected to the show available at the unique address you use.

telephone: Tracking by telephone is done best when a consistent strategy for gathering inquiry information is followed. Be sure to inquire about where they saw your promotional information, what web page they are on (if calling with their web browser open), and ask the inquirer if this is the first time they've contacted you, and what inspired them to call. If you get the generic, "I found you on the web using a search engine" answer, you can ask what search engine they prefer to use, and what they were initially looking for. People generally do not remember the key words, but they will remember why they sat down and started searching. If you know when they found you it is possible to use web analytics to determine what they were searching for.

Basic Web Analytics

Basic Web Analytics is the tracking of web site visitors on your web site. At the basic level, you will learn where your web site visitors came from (other web sites, which search terms and search engines), where they went, and how long they visited.

Many ISP's responsible for hosting web sites provide basic tracking software that is hosted on your server. Most allow you to perform basic analytics at no additional cost. Ask your ISP what web traffic tools are available to you at no cost.

Some discount web hosting services may only permit you to access the .log file, which contains detailed data on your web site use. Log files are generated automatically and generally updated each month. You may be required to purchase software to analyze the data. Most data analysis software is available for you to download and try for a number of days before buying. Generally the more you pay, the better the data analysis is.

At the basic level, you should know:

• number of web site visitors per day
• where the bulk of your visitors is coming from
• what the most frequently used entry pages are
• how long each visitor stayed on your site
• web visitation stats for each marketing campaign you run

As you try out web enhancement tactics and web site marketing strategies you will be able to track improvement to your web site traffic in each of these areas.

Deep Web Traffic Analytics

Tools like those listed at the bottom of the page cost hundreds of dollars, but yield strategic web design information that is worth many times the investment if the information gathered is used to continually adjust your web content and marketing campaigns.

Deep Web Traffic analysis is not offered as part of traditional web hosting service. As the internet evolves expect web analytics to provide more and more advanced reporting to assist web savvy operators with ever more targeted web marketing strategies.

Geomatics: This service allows you to see precisely where your web visits are coming from, sometimes with an accuracy down to the postal code. With information on precisely where your web visits are coming from, targeted off-line marketing strategies can be tailored to very precise geographic areas.

Graphic Web Page Traffic Analysis: ClickZ's award for outstanding analytics last year went to WebTrends ClickTracks Analyzer. The tool puts your web page in a browser window and allows you to see what page elements users clicked to and from to browse your site. Specific web page content can be tweaked by adjusting calls to action, headlines, images and text to encourage traffic flow which results in greater response to your offers and a more engaging visitor experience.

Remote Tracking Services: Some online web tracking services provide you with a small java script which you cut and paste into each page on your web site. The java script sends information to the data service which updates your tracking statistics and provides detailed statistical information without the use of the Log file.

Email / Newsletter Statistics and What to do with them

The most cost effective way to manage outgoing email (bulk newsletters, notices, etc.) is with web based ASP database services. As mentioned in earlier tutorials, the statistics are made available for each campaign you run.

Every effort should be made to control the expense of your online email campaign by removing or correcting bounced email from your outgoing lists. Since most online services are on a per email rate, send only email you know is arriving in someone's inbox.

Online services also provide click through reports which allow you to see immediate results of user responses to your calls to action. By embedding hyperlinks into your outgoing email, you can track the wording of your Calls to Action, the attractiveness of your Special Offers and adjust your offerings appropriately.

You can also determine how many people are passing your email on to their friends and family, how many subscribers are opting out as well as how many emails are arriving in inboxes and being put in the trash without ever being opened.

Be sure to try out different subject lines and see what combination of words produces the greatest rate of openings!

When tracking an email campaign, always provide offers that are of a time sensitive nature and alert your front line customer service representatives to ask previous guests what they think of your newsletter when they call.

In the tagline of your email provide a hyperlink to dedicated web content that resides on a specific page within your web. Track the click throughs on your email links to this page with your web analytics (see above).

Assess the Response Rate to your Email against these averages:

• Open rate: 38.8%
• Click thru: 8.3%
• Bounces: 11.5 %
  

Keyword Advertising Reports and What to do with them

Keyword Advertising Reports (made available free to advertisers) provide a great deal of useful detail including:

• keyword click through rates
• cost per click through
• sales conversion rates can also be added to your data record for monitoring your success in delivering Calls to Action from your web click throughs.

Ensure Relevance of Listings

The first thing to do, is ensure that your keyword advertisement campaign is generating the minimal amount of click throughs necessary to keep your listing. If the sponsoring search engines do not see a minimal amount of click throughs, your advertisement will be dropped. (See keyword advertising tutorial for tips on successfully designing keyword campaigns)

In the initial hours and days of your campaign you will need review your keyword advertising statistics in order to make adjustments to your offer and keywords in order to ensure your listing is relevant and is producing click throughs.

Secondly, you may need to increase the amount of money you wish to spend for each click to move your advertisement into a higher position on the page. Since most search engines provide the top 1-3 relevant click through advertisements to other sites your ad will be shown to a lot more people if it is listed among the top three. Make a number of adjustments to your keyword spend early in the campaign and choose a spend that produces the best return.

Reviewing your Statistics for Keyword Advertising that is Generating Click Throughs

Remember that a high click through rate at the lowest possible cost is not the be all and end all of your advertising report. Perhaps the most beneficial data on the success of your keyword advertising is bookings and solid telephone inquiries based on your landing page content. Once your keyword advertisements are successfully being shown regularly by search engines, the data your campaign reveals will be most useful in determining where you are wasting money.

For example:
Your data for: "Great Northern Ontario Ice Fishing Vacations" might reveal over a month in January that 10,000 people see your keyword ad, and 150 people click through to your web site. A click through rate of 1.5 % is very good. At $.15 per click this campaign may have cost you $22.50. However if upon deeper analysis, you realize that there were no people who followed through with a call to action (signed up for newsletter (tracked through web analytics), or called about a special offer (tracked offline) your offer is missing the boat. Your keyword ad is inspiring a click through, but there is a problem with your web page. The first thing to do is make adjustments to your web page. If you make adjustments to your web page and still fail to see a measurable response to your offer, you might correctly assume that your services do not meet the needs of those clicking through. Consider refining your keyword advertisement to better match your web page content or consider dropping this keyword advertising segment all together.

In another scenario you might see your click through rate be lower (0.9%), but result in two offline phone calls which result in a booking and two sign ups to your newsletter. This scenario should be more rewarding.

As above, keyword campaigns are best directed to specific web pages within your site. Although Keyword Advertising services provide statistics on user data including click through rates, comparing your actual data with the reported data may reveal inconsistencies and lead you to determine whether your keyword service provider user statistics is accurate. Since you are paying per click, ensure that the clicks you are paying for are real.

In using statistics from Offline data (phone inquiries), email/newsletter, web analytics, and keyword advertising, the best overall picture of the success of your web enhancement strategies will be seen by considering all data together. As seen by the review of keyword advertising data above, a click through determination of success may mean you are good at writing keyword advertisements, but it won't contribute to the economic sustainability of your business. In fact, perhaps the most relevant web enhancement statistics will be determined by the frequency of your phone ringing. So plan now for tracking offline data.

It is best to be most interested in meeting the needs of the person on the other end of the phone first. When collecting trackable information, inquire about the information you would like in a delicate manner and if it hasn't come up naturally in conversation, save these questions to the end of the phone call.

Sometimes being at the top of the adword listings isn't as good as being listed quite a bit further down. Read an interesting article on the topic from Media Daily News.

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